Do I not get it or something?

It just felt like an individualist white middle class mans fantasy of how he'd totally outgrind and outsmart the prison system by doing epic taxes and being a good person

just befriend the prison guards!

play beautiful cultured classical music to these poor barbarous inmates as an act of # la resistance

then, totally own the corrupt system by exposing them to newspapers... the police and judicial system are otherwise perfect so the prison commissioner will kill himself rather than face the HARSH HARSH CONSEQUENCES that one could receive in America for money laundering... notwithstanding that the money laundering is chump change in comparison to the slave wage labour that the inmates are made to perform...

Morgan Freeman speaks in hope platitudes for the entire movie

Is this movie not just about how all you need to do is grin and grind to escape your hellish life?

Then people jerk it off for 'showing the humanity of prisoners for the first time EVER in cinema and not treating prison rape as a joke' - surely you can only find such a thing to be true if you have only ever seen about 5 movies in your life? Or is that just a pure indictment of the Hollywood system - that it only ever makes garbage visible?

Am I being cynical? Was I just in a bad mood?

Utterly cheesy and without charm.

  • MaoTheLawn [any, any]
    ·
    3 months ago

    I suppose so, yeah. Although I didn't really like Red's characterization because it seemed so platitudinal. Otherwise yeah, it looks nice and feels, for the most part, human.

    At the end of the day, what can one expect from a Stephen King hollywood adaptation?

    EDIT: I love One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest for that reason, although I guess that's a more cynically ending film. The big moment for Chief gives me more catharsis than Andy or Red's escape.

    • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      3 months ago

      The funniest Stephen King adaptation is the one adapted to film by Stephen King: Maximum Overdrive.

      he has given interviews that were pretty explicit about the movie the ended up with was Stephen King director making a Stephen King book into a movie, fueled by cocaine.

      like I want to say he said something like, he watched the completed movie and decided he needed to "get clean" over it.

      • Findom_DeLuise [she/her, they/them]
        ·
        3 months ago

        Hiring AC/DC to score a 3-hour film is one of those things that should put any self-respecting cokehead on the path to sobriety.

        • ChestRockwell [comrade/them, any]
          ·
          3 months ago

          Rewatched it recently, it is genius even though it's deranged.

          WE MADE YOU. WEEEE MADE YOUUUUUU

          Also I love this bit of lore:

          Stephen King: The movie is about all these vehicle goings crazy and running by themselves, so we started shooting a lot of gas pedals, clutches, transmissions, things like that, operating themselves. We had one sequence: The gas pedal goes to the floor, the gas pedal goes up, the clutch goes in, the gears shifts by itself, the clutch comes out and the gas pedal goes back to the floor again. We were able to shoot everything but the transmission from the driver's side door. The transmission was a problem, because we kept seeing either a corner of the studio of a reflection.

          So I said: This is no problem, we will simply take the camera around to the other side and shoot the transmission from there. Total silence. Everybody looked at everybody else. You know what's happening here, right? I'd crossed the axis. It was like farting at the dinner party. Nobody wanted to say you've made a terrible mistake. I didn't get this job because I could direct or because I had any background in film; I got it because I was Stephen King.

          So finally [cameraman] Daniele Nannuzzi told me I'd crossed the 180-degree axis and that this simply wasn't done, and although I didn't understand what it was, I grasped the idea that I was breaking a rule.

          Later on, I called George [Romero] up on the phone and I said, "What is this axis shit?" and he laughed his head off and explained it, and I said, "Can you break it -- the rule?" He said, "It's better not to, but if you have to, you can. If you look at The Battleship Potemkin" (which I never have), "it crosses the axis all the time, and the guy [Sergei Eisenstein] gets away with it." Then I saw David Lynch and asked him: "What's this about crossing the axis?" and he burst out laughing and said, "That always gets me." And I asked if you could do it, and he gave me this startled look and said, "Stephen, you can do anything. You're the director." Then he paused and said, "But it doesn't cut together."

          • Findom_DeLuise [she/her, they/them]
            ·
            3 months ago

            Ha, nice. My favorite Maximum Overdrive Deep Lore was an outtake from when they shot the sequence where the steamroller runs over the little league team. In the finished cut, the blood bag smears over the roller. In the outtake cut, it just explodes everywhere. King claims that he sent that footage over to Romero, and that Romero vomited after seeing it.

            ...Maybe it's not that deep of Deep Lore if a presenter was talking about it when they aired it on TNT back in the 90s.